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Updating a SharePoint List from Excel - Too Many Queries / Too Slow

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Posted on by Bub

Greetings Experts 😉

I've made the world's simplest Flow and it's mis-behaving. It's taking 20+ minutes to run and I'm getting warnings about the number of queries it's making.

I want to bring 5 values from an excel file into a SharePoint list - both lists are about 1700 rows in length.

Am I missing something obvious? It's so slow and there seem to be way too many queries for something so simple, albeit with 1700 rows.

Any suggestions very welcome 😉

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Using flows

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David_MA 14,586 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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There is not enough information to determine why your flow is taking so long. Do you have a filter query on the Excel action or is every item in the spreadsheet being processed in the first apply to each? If every row in Excel is being processed, then that is 1,700 get item actions. And then you are doing another apply to each on the items retrieved from SharePoint. Is there a filter query on the Get items action? If not, then you are getting and updating 1,700 items in your second apply to each. That would explain why it is taking 20 minutes as that would be over 5,100 actions the flow needs to take, which means it is processing each one in about 1/4 second.

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lbendlin 8,709 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Consider using the Sharepoint Batch API.

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Bub 52 on at

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There is a filter on the get items query. It just checks that the Title matches each entry title from the spreadsheet. So it does process all 1700 items in both the list and spreadsheet.

Someone mentioned Batch API - might this help?

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David_MA 14,586 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I've never used the batch API yet. Maybe @lbendlin can offer insight.

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lbendlin 8,709 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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The documentation is pretty good. Bit of a heavy lifting, but worth it.

Make batch requests with the REST APIs | Microsoft Learn

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Bub 52 on at

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Sorted. Now runs in under a minute. Not a bad reduction from nearly half an hour previously!

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